White on White

The White Stripes are, in most ways, Jack's creation. He writes the songs, plays everything except drums and devised the band's peppermint-stripe color scheme. And he does almost all the talking. "I'm just a very shy person," Meg confesses at lunch, although she defends the primal quality of her drumming with sweet firmness. "That is my strength. A lot of drummers would feel weird about being that simplistic."

Born John Gillis in 1975, Jack (who took Meg's surname when they married) actually started out as a drummer, at age five. But music was not his first career choice. In high school, Jack, a Catholic, seriously thought of entering the priesthood. After graduating, he considered joining the Marines but instead worked as an upholsterer and, for a time, as a gofer on TV car-commercial shoots. "I could see that it was impossible to get your ideas across, with all the people -- the soundman, lighting people, producers -- you had to go through," he says. "I suppose that put me in the direction of a two-piece band."

Jack played drums and guitar in several Detroit garage bands (Two Part Resin, the Go, Goober and the Peas, the Hentchmen) before he and Meg, another Detroit native, made their local live debut in 1997. Jack soon found that underground cool came at a price. "We were everybody's secret band," he says. "Then our second album [De Stijl] came out, and it was 'Oh, they're not that good anymore.' When we hit the mainstream, I had to go through that game all over again, on a worldwide scale."

Jack may be a reluctant star, but he is a fireball in conversation. He speaks at high speed, his brown eyes looking directly at you like derringer barrels, and his laugh is a series of short, sharp bangs, like a string of firecrackers going off. For more than three hours, over two sessions, he goes into excited detail about, among other things, the Captain Beefheart and Gun Club records that blew his teenage mind, the album he produced for his idol Loretta Lynn (2004's Van Lear Rose) and the record he's finishing with his new band, the Raconteurs, formed with fellow Detroit rocker Brendan Benson.

"I've got enough time," Jack says cheerfully of having two groups at once. "I don't have a day job anymore." And Meg claims she is not worried about the effect on the White Stripes' future. "Jack's always done five things at once," she says. "He was in two other bands when we started this one. This is not unusual."